Chapter 132 - Threat Catering

Chapter 132: Chapter 132 - Threat Catering

By the fourth HYDRA base, Lucius had developed a system.

Tony entered first with a dark-gold shell fitted over his new armour. The force field followed every plate closely enough to be usefully visible and bullets irrelevant. Lucius followed when convenient, ignored the cleared routes, and searched whatever part of the facility looked expensive.

Sometimes that meant laboratories or vaults. HYDRA officers were more useful because their minds contained both, and Lucius considered consent an administrative obstacle invented by people with no defence against telepathic intrusion.

The base in France had been built into the mountain near Mont Blanc, where the cold assisted concealment and made every evacuation route unpleasant. Its surrender began after Lucius floated above the outer wall. Most of the garrison had seen the broadcasts and recordings from other bases he showed the same way, New York and Sands Point. Those who had not were educated by the first force field that crossed a firing lane without slowing.

Lucius found the commander in the control centre while the rest of the team cleared the final corridor.

The man had reached the only window and was deciding whether the mountain offered a better chance than capture. Lucius closed one hand around his throat with Telekinesis and turned him away from the glass.

"Where is Strucker’s base?"

The commander’s teeth met before Lucius entered his mind, broke through the rehearsed names and false facilities, and found Sokovia beneath them. Coordinates followed, then an access route, defensive positions and the reinforced chamber where Strucker kept the sceptre he had promised to lend.

Lucius took all of it. He continued after the useful memories ended, tearing through command phrases, faces and every small certainty that let the officer recognise himself. The body remained alive when he finished. Most of the person did not.

"You should have reminded your employer that unpaid debts accrue interest."

The commander’s mouth moved without producing a word.

Lucius opened the window and threw him through it.

-

The control-centre doors burst inward as Steve arrived with his shield raised. Natasha came through beside him, Sam behind them with his wing assembly folded close, and Tony took the wider angle because a metal suit made subtle entry a charitable fiction.

Steve heard the broken window before he saw it. He crossed the room, looked down and caught sight of a human figure tumbling against the white slope below.

When he turned, the cold in his eyes had nothing to do with the mountain.

"We’re not murderers, Noctis."

Lucius remained beside the open window. "Then your innocence has survived another operation, Rogers. Congratulations."

Several HYDRA officers had already disappeared after Lucius entered their rooms, commanders and guards alike.

"That man was a prisoner. We detain them and hand them over for trial. We don’t execute people."

Tony and Natasha rubbed their temples at almost the same moment.

Only a few people on Earth could have forced Lucius to stop. Banner had kept his distance through most of the operation because the Hulk was the only member of the group with a credible chance, and a serious fight between them would leave the surrounding countryside in need of new maps.

Lucius could have solved that concern by teleporting them both into space. No one had asked because team communication remained poor.

Lucius turned from the window. "Shieldman, you appear confused about the arrangement. I am here because Tony asked and because he finally agreed to deliver my yacht. I did not join your team. I did not accept your orders, your laws or whichever dead institution Fury is pretending to command this week."

Frost spread from beneath his shoes. It passed over broken glass and climbed the nearest console, whitening its dark surface.

"I have enough power to act freely, Rogers. That freedom is not subject to your approval. Try to command me again, and the world can fucking discover whether it mourns Captain America as enthusiastically the second time."

Sam shifted his weight. Natasha did not reach for a weapon. Steve’s grip tightened around the shield, but he held his ground. He and the rest of the world were aware Vibranium was not an effective defence against this monster.

Lucius looked at Tony instead.

"Strucker is hiding in Sokovia. I found the base and the sceptre. You will receive the coordinates once I remove the commander’s more embarrassing memories from the package."

He snapped his fingers. The dark-gold field around Tony brightened where bullets had thinned it during the entry, every damaged layer restoring itself at once.

"Do try not to let Shieldman scratch the armour before then."

Lucius flew through the broken window and vanished around the mountain.

-

Tony watched the force field shimmer beneath the control room’s failing lights. It was the sort of protection he would have preferred to study without first accepting that the man providing it had just thrown someone down a mountain.

He turned to Steve with the shell still shimmering. "Capsicle, is the chronic death wish part of the serum, or have you been maintaining that naturally?"

"He had no right."

"Excellent. Put it on a card and slide it under the door of the seven-foot telepath who just threatened to kill you."

Steve faced him. "You think I should say nothing?"

"I think the next time you challenge him, you should do it somewhere away from me, Romanoff, Birdman and any civilians who enjoy having a horizon." Tony crossed to the main console and pulled a HYDRA cable from its port. "Lucius is dangerous on a pleasant day. Today we walked through a mountain base because half the guards surrendered when they recognised him. The other half kept checking the ceiling in case he came through it."

He connected JARVIS to the surviving system. HYDRA had begun wiping the servers before the outer wall fell, but panic had left several local terminals active.

"We faced no serious resistance," Tony continued. "The only operational difficulty has been you trying to install a leash on someone who regards murder as customer feedback. The attempt would be adorable if it were not trying to kill us, so stop it."

"Murder doesn’t become acceptable because the murderer is useful."

Tony’s hands paused over the controls. "No. It becomes something we survive long enough to argue about intelligently."

His hands resumed moving.

Natasha waited until the first directory opened before approaching Steve. Sam joined her, keeping the folded assembly clear of the consoles.

Natasha kept her attention on Steve. "I dislike agreeing with Stark when he can hear me. He’s still right about Noctis. You knew what Lucius was before you asked him about Bucky. He searched my mind because he could, and he remembers that I tried to kill him. If you push until he makes this personal, vindictive is the best outcome you should expect."

Steve looked toward the broken window. The figure below had vanished into the distance and snow.

"Needing his help doesn’t make this right."

Sam glanced toward the window. "No, but getting yourself killed makes helping Bucky harder. You already got terms from the guy. Let him work his magic before you volunteer for the memorial edition of the shield."

The hand around Steve’s shield loosened.

Behind them, Tony recovered the first uncorrupted file and found a Sokovian routing code buried in the French commander’s traffic.

--

Wakanda acquired more neighbours without moving a border.

By the time T’Chaka returned, military aircraft crowded the airfields of surrounding nations under a succession of joint exercises, security exchanges and humanitarian-readiness drills. Governments that had ignored those same neighbours for decades discovered an urgent interest in regional friendship once the word Vibranium entered their briefings.

No army crossed into Wakanda, yet. Their presence converted every diplomatic request into a threat with catering.

Shuri finished the king’s mechanical arm before the leg.

-

The replacement hand closed around a calibration cylinder in her laboratory, pressure rising until the metal complained. T’Chaka watched the figures climb across the display and did not look at the space beneath his right shoulder.

"Release it."

The fingers remained closed.

"Baba."

He released the cylinder. Four shallow depressions remained in its surface.

"The response is delayed."

"By eleven thousandths of a second. Your nerves are still adjusting to the interface."

"Then improve it."

Shuri looked at him across the workbench. The scientists behind her had learned to take an interest in other displays whenever the king entered the laboratory in his usual rage.

"I can improve the interface, but I cannot make the first day become the hundredth because you glare at it."

T’Challa stood beside the mobility platform while the mechanical leg completed another diagnostic cycle. Every report arriving from the border lay open on the display beside him.

The king fitted the arm against its mounting. The connection locked with a quiet click.

"Another invitation came," T’Challa said.

T’Chaka flexed the new fingers. "From whom?"

"The summit secretariat in Vienna. They have added a session on strategic materials and concealed military capacity."

"They have added Wakanda."

"Yes."

The first invitation had requested an envoy. The second had requested a minister. This one named King T’Chaka and included the itinerary his delegation was expected to follow.

Shuri returned to the leg display. "That is not an invitation."

T’Chaka tested the range of his new wrist. "It is a summons written by people too frightened to admit they are making demands."

Anger had sustained him through American custody, the journey home and the first fitting. It also followed him into every council session. He rejected inspections, resource agreements and foreign observers before the ministers finished reading them.

"If you refuse," T’Challa said, "the exercises will grow."

"If I attend, they will call pressure diplomacy and demand gratitude for stopping short of invasion."

The mechanical hand closed again. This time the calibration cylinder buckled.

T’Chaka looked at the damage and opened his fingers one by one.

"Prepare the royal aircraft."

T’Challa inclined his head. Shuri shut down the diagnostic before her father could begin walking without it.

"We are coming with you."

"You are required here."

"The leg is mine, the arm is mine, and the people summoning you have already demonstrated their respect for Wakandan property. I am coming."

T’Chaka’s refusal reached his face and stopped there. He looked from his daughter to his son, then toward the screens showing foreign aircraft circling beyond Wakanda’s borders.

"Both of you."

-

Vienna received the Wakandan royal family with soldiers behind polished barriers and diplomats who called the security reassuring.

T’Chaka entered the summit hall on the leg Shuri had built. The mechanism had improved during the flight as Shuri treated eleven thousandths of a second as a personal insult. His stride remained slightly uneven. Anyone who stared discovered T’Challa staring back.

Inside, delegates wanted declarations, inspection schedules and an accounting of the world’s Vibranium supply. T’Chaka gave them acknowledgement without surrender. Wakanda existed as more than the poor agricultural state it had presented. Its security policy would be reviewed. Its sovereignty was not a mineral concession.

The questions followed them into the corridor after the session. Shuri left for a technical briefing while T’Challa stayed beside his father and the aides cleared a path through cameras and waiting officials.

Light reached them from outside the glass before the sound. The windows entered the hall as a moving wall of fragments, followed by stone, metal and the pressure of the explosion. T’Challa turned toward his father and lost the floor.

He woke beneath part of a collapsed support with dust sealing his mouth. One ear registered nothing while the other gave him alarms, screaming and the rough scrape of his own hands against broken stone.

With his shoulder beneath the support, T’Challa shifted it far enough to crawl free. Blood covered one sleeve as he found the mechanical arm several feet away, still curled around a torn section of railing.

Beyond it, T’Chaka lay trapped beneath fallen masonry. T’Challa reached him before the security teams did, tore the stone away and pressed both hands against the wound below his father’s ribs while he called for Shuri.

T’Chaka’s eyes found him once.

His remaining hand closed weakly against T’Challa’s wrist, held there for one breath and fell.

By the time Shuri fought through the security cordon, the king of Wakanda was dead.

-

T’Challa returned home beside his father’s coffin.

The rites and succession occurred beyond foreign cameras. Wakanda had offered the world one murdered king already, and the council would not provide a better angle of his son becoming the next.

The military exercises did not end. Condolences arrived beside renewed demands, each government saddened by the assassination and eager to discuss the strategic uncertainty it had created.

In the council chamber, Shuri stood before the same screens that had once shown Lucius smiling over their father’s blood.

"They summoned him, and now they want inspection teams at the funeral."

T’Challa sat where his father had sat. The position felt temporary beneath him, though every person in the chamber now waited for his decision.

"They will receive no inspection team."

Several elders relaxed. T’Challa did not let the relief settle.

"They will receive an embassy that speaks truth about our capacity, negotiations chosen by us, and access only where Wakanda decides it is useful. We will reveal no reserve, surrender no weapon and accept no foreign command."

Shuri stared at him. "You are opening the country."

"I am choosing how it opens. Noctis destroyed the strongest defence, sister. Father’s attack made denial impossible."

"And the armies?"

"They will lose their excuse slowly. So will the thieves."

T’Challa drew the first diplomatic directive toward him.

"One step." T’Challa signed it. "Then we decide whether the world has earned another."